


Linger

by zarabithia



Category: Captain America (Comics)
Genre: Canonical Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-24
Updated: 2008-12-24
Packaged: 2018-01-25 03:29:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,334
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1629143
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zarabithia/pseuds/zarabithia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bernie Rosenthal and Arnie Roth have a chat.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Linger

**Author's Note:**

> As always, thanks go to Cero for listening to me complain about how this wouldn't stay a drabble.
> 
> Written for destroythemeek

 

 

Once upon a time long ago, Bernie Rosenthal had dated a wonderful man. They'd never quite been enough for one another, Bernie had sensed, but they'd had enough stubbornness and determination between them to not let such a small fact get in their way. Ultimately, what a generation gap and opposing cultural viewpoints couldn't tear asunder, the daily grinds of jobs and duty could. 

She'd gone her way, and he'd gone his. Bernie had looked back once...or twice...over the years since then. But mostly, she'd picked herself up and moved on. Because that was what a strong woman of her generation did, and Bernie prided herself in being a strong woman. That strength had led her all the way to law school and a successful practice, after all, and it wasn't to be relinquished over an old flame.

There might have been nights that Bernie regretted, but none in which she surrendered either her dignity nor her strength long enough to wallow in the fancy of what might have been. 

At least, not until the day Bernie's law office stood still as the news that would change America broke across every news channel in the country.

Captain America was dead. 

For the nation, nothing else would matter on that day. Bernie's practice shut down for the one brief day when the justice system had so spectacularly failed that not even a room full of lawyers could pretend otherwise. 

Bernie was glad for the respite, because on that one day, as she collapsed into the large leather chair in the office gained through her strength, Bernie felt weaker than she had ever felt in her life.

~~~

She didn't attend the ceremony. She received an invitation, one that came directly from Tony Stark himself.

Every ounce of diplomatic skill she'd learned in law school was utilized in order not to tell Tony Stark exactly where he could shove his invitation. He might have looked as miserable as a kicked puppy, but Bernie was not willing to give him the exoneration that his guilty expression seemed to beg for.

Because, after all, he was still alive to feel miserable. Steve was not. Any part of Bernie that was convinced of the logical, legal part of Tony Stark's position on registration, any part that understood why Stark had made a stand that had put him at odds against Steve, was promptly ignored in the face of that one undeniable fact. So Tony Stark could feel as miserable as he wanted, but Bernie would not grant him the reprieve he was looking for. 

Nor did Bernie have any particular need to attend the ceremony to listen to the public mourning of Tony, or all the other heroes who either hadn't been able to prevent Steve's death or had played as active of a role in that death as Tony Stark. 

But sitting in her apartment, getting drunk off the bottle of rum she kept stored in a china cabinet otherwise befitting a professional woman with her amount of success didn't seem like an appropriate way to honor Steve, either. 

However, Steve was buried on the same day of the week that he had always taken flowers to Arnie's grave. Taking those flowers to Arnie's grave was a way for Bernie to show the kind of tribute to Steve that she wasn't willing to do at his public ceremony.

~~~~

Bone cancer, Steve had told her once, had to be one of the most painful ways to go. Bernie had doubted that at the time, so she had taken the time to do a little research.

When she was finished with her research, Bernie wished she hadn't. 

Now, as she lay the flowers in front of Arnie's grave, Bernie wondered how long, exactly, Steve had suffered as he died. That was a detail that no one, including Tony Stark, was willing to divulge. 

She hoped he didn't suffer. Captain America would have been able to stand it, but her sweet, old fashioned boy had watched his own mother waste away with a body full of suffering. He'd watched his sidekick plummet to his death. He'd watched fellow soldiers fall and not been able to stop it. 

Captain America might have been able to stand the pain, but it seemed monumentally unfair to Bernie that someone who knew so much more about suffering than most others would have been forced to endure even more suffering at the end of their life. She much preferred to think it had been quick, and over the minute the bullets hit him, though a tiny, nagging suspicion told her that his physique and the super soldier serum made a quick mercy blow impossible. 

Bernie squatted next to the grave and arranged the bouquet of flowers she'd purchased. She couldn't remember which type of flowers Steve had insisted on bringing to Arnie, so she went instead with an assortment of different ones. Steve was always a bit more concerned with detail than she was. She remembered when that attention to detail had caused momentary irritations - when she'd had to take time to look for just the right movie that he wouldn't disagree with on moral or personal reasons.

She might have moved on with her life, but she'd give anything to be able to still be _able_ to find that part of Steve's personality annoying, even if she had to do so at a distance.

That would take a while to become a possibility again, Bernie supposed. 

While Bernie's theories and beliefs about death were a complicated mesh of what she had been raised to believe as a good Jewish girl, and what the world she lived in as the former girlfriend of a over 80 year old superhero had shown to be true, at that point, she wanted the man whose grave she was kneeling at to be able to hear her.

"I think he was always envious of you," she told the grave. "Did you know that? That you had the life that Captain America coveted? First as a protector, then as a man who'd been allowed to live out his life without a stint frozen in the ocean." 

How much more peaceful Steve's life might have been had he been allowed to live out his life after the war, Bernie thought. He could have married, had a family...

Steve would have been a great father, Bernie thought painfully. 

"Our world would have been all the worse for not having him in it today," Bernie told Arnie. "And yet, the same world willingly turned their back on him when he was only trying to be the kind of protector that he'd always wanted to be." No, that wasn't quite right. "That he always _was_." From the minute he'd put on the uniform, at least. 

Bernie wondered if that frustrated Steve, to see what his world had become. One of the few things that always drove Steve to points of anger and frustration was seeing a world that refused to do the _right_ thing. 

Steve dearly loved his country. He would not have made such a stance - legally treason - unless he felt deeply in his heart that it was the right thing to do. His friends, his government, and his country all turned their back on him in return.

"Perhaps he is better off with you," she remarked to Arnie. "I sometimes wonder if he'd been allowed to come home after the war, if he wouldn't have ended up with you, anyway."

But that really wasn't a train of thought she wanted to pursue. Not today, of all days.

"I'm not sure the afterlife works that way," she said softly as she stood. "But if it does...then I hope he is under your protection once again. He certainly could have used it, this past year."

Drying her eyes, Bernie gave one last glance at the relic of her past before she returned to the life she had made for herself in the present. 

 


End file.
